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Tips on Preventing Facebook Spams

How does Facebook Spams affects you?

Like the world of Internet, there are many Cyber Attacks happened like happens in the real world. We don't know why people created spams especially on Facebook, maybe its an marketing strategy to gain more clicks and visitors, maybe just a trip for them, or maybe something reasons we didn't know.

"As a global service connecting 400 million people, Facebook has helped build and extend communities around the world. As with any community, the benefits of bringing people together are occasionally accompanied by inappropriate or unacceptable conduct by a small number of people. This behavior ranges from thoughtless to criminal and can degrade the experience for others or undermine the community itself.

On Facebook, the most common unacceptable behavior involves some abuse of our communication tools. This can be as innocent as annoying others with too many messages or friend requests or as serious as deliberately trying to spam others for commercial gain.

We take these deliberate spam attacks seriously and devote a tremendous amount of our engineering time and talent to build systems that detect suspicious activity and automatically warn people about inappropriate behavior or links. Because of our efforts, only a very small percentage of people who use Facebook has ever experienced spam or a security issue.

Every once in a while, though, people misunderstand one of these systems. They incorrectly believe that Facebook is restricting speech because we've blocked them from posting a specific link or from sending a message to someone who is not a friend. Over the years, these misunderstandings have caused us to be wrongly accused of issues ranging from stifling criticism of director Roman Polanski over his sexual abuse charges to curbing support for ending U.S. travel restrictions on Cuba to blocking opponents of same-sex marriage.

To try to be more transparent, we've been working to improve our warnings and make them more clear. We'd also like to take this opportunity to explain in more detail how our systems work.

New warning explaining why content has been blocked.

With billions of pieces of content being shared on Facebook every month and bad actors constantly targeting the people who use Facebook, preventing spam isn't easy. Just as a community relies on its citizens to report crime, we rely on you to let us know when you encounter spam, which can be anything from a friend request sent by someone you don't know to a message that includes a link to a malicious website.

Using information from your reports and what we know about how the average person uses Facebook, we've identified certain common patterns of unacceptable behavior. For example, we've learned that if someone sends the same message to 50 people not on his or her friend list in the span of an hour, it's usually spam. Similarly, if 75 percent of the friend requests a person sends are ignored, it's very likely that that person is annoying others he or she doesn't actually know.

We can't share all of the details of how these systems work because if we did, the spammers might try to get around them. However, they're designed to automatically detect suspicious behavior, block it and warn the person who's engaging in it to slow down.

In extreme cases where the behavior continues despite our warnings, we may disable the person's account. When this happens, it usually isn't a person's account at all but a fake account or a real account that's been compromised. The compromised accounts are put into a process to give control back to the rightful owner. In all other cases, we always give the person an opportunity to appeal the decision by contacting us. We then review the account and reactivate it if we determine that the person hasn't violated our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. For more information on our warnings, check out our Help Center.

These automated systems don't just prevent spam and other annoyances. They also protect against dangerous websites that damage your computer or try to steal your information. When we're notified about one of these sites, we immediately add it to a block list and prevent Wall posts or messages that link to it. We also provide the person who's attempting to share the link with an explanation of why it's blocked and a way to correct us if we're wrong.

Sometimes, spammers try to hide their malicious links behind URL shorteners like Tiny URL orbit.ly, and in rare cases, we may temporarily block all use of a specific shortener. If you hit a block while using a URL shortener, try a different one or just use the original URL for whatever you're trying to share.

These systems are so effective at working in the background that most people who use Facebook will never encounter one. They're not perfect, though, and we're always working to improve them. We do this by actively monitoring appeals and learning from the rare cases in which we make mistakes.

If you do encounter one of our spam prevention systems, remember that its sole intent is to protect you and maintain Facebook's trusted environment."